


Lost in a Dream

by FindingTarshish



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Meta, Past Attempted Suicide, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 10:24:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19462030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FindingTarshish/pseuds/FindingTarshish
Summary: What if, after death, Avacyn found a new life? What if that angel born without a heart found one in a new world, one made of ink and paper rather than flesh and blood? While Sorin is imprisoned in the wall of Markov Manor, Avacyn reaches out to him from beyond the grave to forgive the man who took her life.WARNING: This deals with some heavy themes. There's no content warning on the site for mental health, but if that's something you're worried about, maybe give this one a pass.Comments are highly appreciated. If you see anything to criticize, please do so so I can grow as a writer.





	Lost in a Dream

Sorin blinked his eyes open. He could feel beneath him something soft. A bed. Above him, he saw wooden rafters, stretching across a roof that tapered to a slight point ten feet above him. He shot bolt upright. Where was he?

As he gazed around, the room seemed only more ordinary. There was the singular bed on which he lay, with soft pillows and sheets that smelled of mint, lily-of-the-valley, and someone familiar. A chair and a writing desk stood against the wall opposite him, and a wrought iron spiral staircase lead down below from the corner of the room. The walls were paneled in a lightly-colored wood he didn’t recognize, but every so often, a hanging frame or mounted memento would break up the monotony of the boards: a flat, scale-like fragment of blue-green crystal; a twisted piece of black metal that looked to have been silver at one point; a painted vista of a white-stone city on the shores of a clear blue ocean. Sunlight streamed through a window at the crest of the roof, and the air smelled of salt and sand. In all, the room was furnished sparsely, but warmly; it had a very human touch to it.

Sorin looked at himself. His armor had been removed, as had his sword; he wore a simple cloth tunic and leggings. He winced at the missing weight at his hip as he stood. Rising into the air as to not make any noise in this strange place, he lightly glided across the floor to the writing desk, where papers and pens were strewn about. There were three quills in all, each made from a snow white feather and tipped in an intractable black ink. Two rested in ornate silver inkwells wrapped in engraved patterns of wings, while the third lay dry on the desk beside a completed letter. The characters were the same ones he knew, used on countless planes as the written form of the common tongue, but the words themselves were of a language he did not recognize. Some of them seemed familiar, but never correctly used. Why was the word _See_ capitalized and in the middle of the sentence? Why did it keep saying _die_ over and over again?

“It must be an ancient, eldritch tongue,” Sorin murmured to himself. “Something akin to what the Skirsdag chant.” He tilted his head in surprise. The letter was signed _A. Markov_.

The smell of seared meat and cooking eggs wafted up through the stairs. He pricked his ears. Below, he could hear the sound of a pan scraping against a stove, and the steps of someone with light footfalls: perhaps a child?

Slowly, he crept down the steps, careful to move silently and stealthily. As he passed below the floor, he quietly looked about before going further. It was an ordinary cabin, paneled in wood with a stone-tiled floor. There was a workbench in the corner, where the silvery haft of a spear was clamped in a vice, while the swordlike two-pronged blade lay on the table beside files, whetstones, and other sharpening tools; it was strangely familiar, but Sorin couldn’t place it. A wooden table with two chairs stood in the center of the room. In the corner opposite the stairs was a simple kitchen with a stove, a sink, and a fireplace, which held all manner of pots and kettles, each warming on the fire.

There, in front of the stove, stood a woman with long silky white hair and pale white skin, much like his own. She wore a long black coat, much like the one he often wore. Cut in the back of both coat and shirt were two slits, each exposing a foot long section of bare skin from her shoulders to the center of her back. Beneath the hem of her coat, Sorin could see she was barefoot; a pair of knee-high boots stood beside the door, with a few grains of fine white sand clinging to the soles. Judging from the folds of her coat, she was slightly built, lacking an athletic physique, yet judging by the contents of the workbench, she bore a weapon, and a heavy one at that.

With a thin, delicate hand, she reached up, took a plate from a cabinet, then slid whatever she was making from pan to plate. As she turned, her eyes lit up and Sorin’s heart turned to stone.

“Avacyn?” he breathed.

"Ah, father, you’re awake,” she said. “Come, sit down. I made you breakfast.” She set down on the table a plate of egg and sausage, made just the way he remembered the chef at Markov Manor made them thousands of years ago when he was human. Beside it, she placed a steaming mug of hot coffee. She gestured to a chair, which slid out from under the table, seemingly of its own accord. She looked the same as he remembered her, with long, flowing tresses framing a face of equal parts beauty and power, the pale white skin that betrayed his aspect, and the thin and lithe yet attractive figure that hid the power she wielded. The same electric aura of power seemed to emanate from her, though now it was not the pure white he created, but rather a spectrum of every color, along with something else…

“Avacyn,” Sorin said slowly, “what is this?”

She raised an eyebrow. “It’s breakfast. I’m fairly sure I already said that.”

Odd. He didn’t remember her having a sense of humor. Perhaps she had misunderstood him? “No,” he said. “You. How are you here? How did you survive?”

“I didn’t,” she said, then waved a hand dismissively. “In a moment. First, eat. You must be starving.”

Sorin realized he was. Quickly, almost too quickly, he slid into the chair and began to devour the food with an almost animalistic hunger. Thirst, he knew. Hunger, he had not felt in thousands of years.

“Slow down, you’ll make yourself sick,” Avacyn chided, and handed him a napkin and silverware. He took them gratefully, cleaned his hands, and proceeded to eat with an equally bestial fervor, though now in a more civilized manner.

She sat down beside him at the table with her own mug. As he sipped his coffee, he realized the scent wafting from her mug smelled far and away different from his. His was bitter and tanniny, but hers smelled sweet. “What is that?” he asked, gesturing toward her mug.

“Chocolate,” she answered. He gave her a quizzical stare; cocoa didn’t grow on Innistrad. “What? Can’t an angel have a sweet tooth?” she quipped, smiling. Her smile was… kind, in a way that belied a slight discomfort and shyness, something she had never had before. When last he saw her smile, it had been unnerving, wrong, but now, it was… human.

“This is a dream,” Sorin said. “You’re not real.”

Her smile turned sad. “Of course it’s a dream. That doesn’t mean I’m not real. Aren’t you happy to see your daughter again?”

Sorin set the mug down and stared at her. “I’ve never heard you use a contraction before,” he said, furrowing his brow. As he looked at her, he realized this Avacyn was a far cry from the perfect angel he had made. Before, her eyes had been gleaming, pure white orbs, but now they were those of a human, with white edges inter-crossed with tiny blood vessels, and clear silver-white irises surrounding a black pupil. Her lips, normally a deep black color, were a light, natural pink. Even her skin was merely pale, rather than the shock-white it had been before. But something was missing…

“Avacyn,” Sorin began, looking at her warily. “Where are your wings?

“Retracted,” she said simply. “It’s a trick a certain archangel taught me. Innistradi angels never figured it out.” As if to demonstrate, a single snow-white wing emerged in a blaze of light from the left side of her back through the slit in her clothes. As soon as it reached its full length - an impressive eight or nine feet - it slid back into her body with a _snik._

Sorin closed his eyes and tried to wake up. Nothing happened. “Father, please. I just want to talk,” Avacyn said. “Don’t run from me.” Sorin opened his eyes and looked into hers, sad as they were.

He crossed his legs and cradled his mug. He resisted the urge to snarl at the feeling of being trapped, and at his captor. “Very well,” he said. “Let us talk.”

“So…”

“So?”

“You must have questions,” Avacyn said in a quiet, almost vulnerable voice.

He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “I destroyed you in Thraben Cathedral, yet here you are. You say this is a dream, yet you also claim you are real. Explain.” His voice remained sharp and demanding, despite how emotional Avacyn was being.

She took a deep breath. This was painful for her to recount, Sorin could clearly see. “After I… after I died, my soul--”

“Angels don’t have souls,” Sorin interrupted, his eyes narrow.

Avacyn gave him a withering glare. “After I died, my soul was metaphysically kicked to the gutter. There was no afterlife for me, just a void. I was completely alone in the darkness, trapped in the pain of my last moments. It seemed like an eternity that I was there, but then… someone saved me.”

Sorin leaned forward, his interest piqued.

“There are powers that exist beyond the borders of our multiverse. People who create and destroy entire worlds with a flick of the pen, who observe our very thoughts without us ever being conscious of their existence; for example, after my death, I discovered that thousands, if not millions of people could see inside my head in the moment I died. To them, we are like animals in a terrarium: interesting, but ultimately not sentient. Some think differently. They salvage the souls of the dead and forgotten from the worlds of others and build them new homes. Some draw the people into other worlds. In short, they grow attached to us, and when we die, or the roof of the terrarium closes, they excise us from the husk of a dead world, and put us in a new one, a living one. This is exactly what happened to me.

"I don’t even know his name, only that he referred to himself as the Narrator,” she continued. “He drew my soul out of Innistrad, out of the Blind Eternities, out of Dominia itself. He rebuilt me from the fragments of my soul that remained, and when he was finished, my half-dead body washed ashore on this very same island in soft sunlight under a clear sky.” She suddenly looked like she was going to cry, but then she took a deep breath and composed herself.

“It was there that she found me. The Archangel, another of his creations, this one born of his own mind, rather than salvaged from another's. She carried me to a white stone pavilion on the rocky cliffs of the isle, and worked over me for hours. When I awoke from her ministrations, it was like I was a new person; I was alive and healed and full of energy. We talked for hours on end, she and I. She explained that that her creator - the Narrator - had salvaged the remains of my soul after my own world - Dominia - had discarded me, then reconstructed them to bring me back to life. But I was changed I was still Avacyn, in a way, but it meant something different now. Before, I was to protect. Now… Innistrad is lost to me, and I can never go back. I had to find another reason to be.”

Avacyn looked down, focusing her gaze at some point far into the distance as she remembered. Tears began to run down her cheeks. “It wasn’t easy. I almost killed myself a dozen times in despair. The things I had done under Nahiri’s influence haunted me… I still have nightmares of that time, though I don’t remember most of it. I know that what I did is not strictly my fault, since I had no control over my actions, but it doesn’t matter; my hand wielded the spear. Nahiri had raped my mind and made me a monster, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop her. I felt dirty, defiled. Irredeemable. I took to drinking, and ended up spending my days alternating between blackout drunk and sleeping off a hangover. I stopped talking to people I cared for. I withdrew into myself. It was hell.”

Sorin touched her hand, and she looked up at him in surprise. “I never meant for you to have to go through anything like that,” he said, unsure of his words. Comforting those who had experienced such pain was utterly alien to him. She was utterly alien to him now. This was not the same Avacyn he had faced in Thraben Cathedral, nor even the same Avacyn that emerged from Helvault, that he could clearly see. It was like she had… grown up. A part of him chuckled inwardly: he’d never had the terrifying moment most fathers have when their daughters begin courting.

She sniffed, and wiped at the corners of her eyes. “I know.” She paused for a moment. “Father, did you ever love me?”

Sorin stiffened. The cold, emotionless part of him longed to tell the truth, that she was only ever a tool to him, a protector he knew would never betray him. That he never thought of her as a daughter. But a spark of humanity rebelled; the truth would only hurt her. Even to a heart as cold as his, the thought of hurting her hurt _him_ , so he opened his mouth to lie to her.

“I see,” she whispered, before he could say anything. She withdrew her hand and looked with sad, mournful eyes out the window at the cloudless sky outside.

“Avacyn, I--”

“No,” she said. “Don’t lie to me. At the very least I deserve the truth.” She broke down, crying openly now. “Father, I…” she stammered, and trailed off. “Do you ever regret…?”

“...What I did?” he finished. “Every second. I wish there was another way.”

“You didn’t have to kill me,” she said in a small voice. “You could have…”

“What could I have done, Avacyn?” Sorin asked. “You were a threat to Innistrad. You were upending the balance I worked so hard to create!”

“You and your damned balance,” she shouted as she stood, angrily wiping away tears. “I don’t care! You murdered your own daughter, and for what? You’re stuck in a wall! You couldn’t even beat Nahiri! You should have found a way! In the past thousand years, Innistrad has grown dependent on me. All that falls on the shoulders of Sigarda and Thalia now! Sigarda is good and strong, but she can’t shoulder the burden alone. As for Thalia, she would make a fine Angel of Hope, but she’s human. In forty years or so, she will be too old to protect our world. What then?”

Sorin slammed his fist on the table. “I don’t know! I only did what I thought was right!”

Avacyn’s hard, angry gaze turned wistful and sad once again. “Thus is every tragedy done,” she murmured. “Every choice made for the right reasons, yet all of them lead to ruin.”

“If you’re still alive,” Sorin growled, rising to look her in the eye, “why don’t you come back to protect them?”

Avacyn wiped away the tears angrily and glared at him. “I destroyed every scrap of faith Innistrad had in me. I am cursed by them now, not blessed. Besides, when I died, the mana conduits that connected me to the fabric of Innistrad were broken. If I returned, I would simply be a particularly powerful angel, with no special connection to the world. I wouldn’t be able to hear their prayers. I couldn’t be the Angel of Hope ever again, even if I could reach Innistrad.”

Sorin narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.

“When the Narrator recreated me, I was changed. I suppose I was influenced by him, and absorbed part of his personality. I am more human, true, and I am far and away more powerful - if I faced her now, I could kill Emrakul, actually kill her - but with that power comes a shift in reality. It is as if the laws of physics are different in Dominia than in the place I woke up; they aren’t - mostly, at least - but you understand the analogy. I am now fundamentally incompatible with the fabric of your multiverse. This dream is the closest I can get.” She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her face, then crossed her arms. She took a deep breath, and the vulnerability was gone; her face was hardened and powerful once again.

Sorin took a breath as well, and his composure returned. “Avacyn, why did you bring me here?”

She looked at him, then threw her hands up and sighed. “I don’t know. Catharsis? To my perception, it’s been over three years since you killed me. I tried dozens of times to go home, and every time, I _almost_ made it. I destroyed Emrakul, I ripped out Nahiri’s throat with my bare hands, I saved Innistrad and all its peoples, but then the timeline destabilized and reverted to its original state. Nothing worked. All I had was a few days before the world came apart around me, and threw me back to the shores of my reality. Every single alternate universe in which I had the sense of self I now possess and the power I now wield ripped itself to shreds.”

Sorin looked aside. He understood now: she was trapped outside of the cage. A free vagabond with unspeakable power, yet the only thing she wanted was to go home, the only place barred to her. “I wish you could come back with me,” he said. “I need your help more than ever, now.”

Avacyn nodded. “I know. I wish I could too.” She walked to the window. “Where will you go from here, father?”

Sorin went to stand beside her. “I must find a way out of Nahiri’s trap. Then, I will hunt her down. What she did to you will not go unavenged.” Avacyn smiled, then kissed her father on the cheek. He, in turn, embraced her, and held his daughter in his arms for the first time. Sorin smiled, a strange expression for him, but a sincere one all the same. “Goodbye, my daughter.”

“Goodbye, father.”

Then the dream dissolved, leaving Sorin alone, embedded in a twisted stone wall in the ruins of Markov Manor, and his daughter far beyond his reach in the embrace of another world.


End file.
